Best Conversion Optimization Tips

The Best Way to Get More Leads from Your Current Website Traffic

Conversion optimization is one of the most effective and cheapest ways to get more leads on an ongoing basis. Unfortunately the world of conversion rate optimization (CRO) is often flooded with tips revolving around changing button colours and experimenting with different fonts which just don’t move the needle for low to medium trafficked sites (sites under 10,000 visitors per day)

Throughout the years we’ve discovered 4 powerful methods which any website can implement to start getting more leads almost instantly and they’re all based on the same concept: Trust

Why customers buy from your company:

The biggest reason that customers buy form a particular business (more than price, quality or familiarity) is trust. Too often we as business owners feel our customers choose us because of how special our product or service is. Don’t get me wrong it is important to have something about our product or service which distinguishes us from our competitors but more often than not our unique selling proposition (USP) is what keeps the customer but doesn’t necessarily contribute to the acquisition of the customer nearly as much as we believe.

Every company likes to think they are different from everyone else in the their industry but every company is selling that same pitch. Its far easier and far more effective to compete on trust rather than features or USP’s.

If a company or consumer trusts you more than any other company you have a far greater chance of getting their business regardless of the features or price of your products.

The trust factor is relatively simple to control in your offline interaction with your prospects but the same concepts can be applied to your prospects online experience! The trust equation enables us to think about the factors and variables that go into our ideal web design.

1) Credibility

This refers to how credible you and your company area. That is how much authority you have when it comes to selling your product or a service. Are you more likely to trust a dentist who has been in business for over 10 years or a dentist who proudly exclaims “I’m so happy to be working on you today, you’re my very first customer”. Our customers want to know that we know what we’re doing and that we’re experts in our field!

There are a number of ways to highlight your credibility on your website:

Testimonials: Testimonials are great confirmations of credibility if done correctly. Unfortunately no one trusts one liner testimonials which only have a quote and a singular name. They just look fake (even if they’re not)

Rather use testimonials with peoples images, full name, job title and company OR Video testimonials are the king of testimonials because the user can see its 100% authentic.

Click the link to see Zendesk’s testimonials pages. This is testimonials done right!

Number of customers/subscribers: People trust what other people trust. Showing how many customers or subscribers you have encourages users that they’re not the only one that loves your product, service or content.

We use this in our coffee companies website to illustrate that over 2000 customers rent coffee machines from us:

Featured Companies or Listings: This is similar to testimonials and very effective if you want to attract more of a certain sized customer. Listing the big name companies that you have done business with in the past is a great form of social proof (as per mimecast’s customer list):

Listing Publications: List the publications that you’ve been featured in, immediately aligns your brand with some other more established ones. The Sales Lion does it very well:

2) Reliability:

Reliability is more of an “after the fact” trust signal. Do the salespeople return calls when they say they will? Are all the features working as promised? There are however, a number of reliability features you can employ on your webpage prior to the sale taking place:

Money Back Guarantees: Giving a money back guarantee takes away all the risk from the customer which enables you to overcome the trust gap that much quicker.

Trial Period: A trial period, similar to a money back guarantee, proves to customers that you have enough belief in your product or service that you are confident that they will become customers after completing the test phase.

3) Intimacy:

This is also referred to a likability and this is where the phrase “people buy from people they like” comes from. This statement however is only partly true as it should read “people buy from people they trust”.

Likability is a difficult variable to quantify but it can be used on one’s website by crafting one’s message into customer focused one rather than self-focused tone. We have seen so many home pages where the content is mostly about the company rather than the problems which the company solves for it’s customers. You can often get far better results by changing your phrasing to take a problem-solving tone rather than a self-praising one.

The other factor which aids the likability/intimacy factor is when your customers resonate with WHY you do what you do. This is why “our story” pages are often one of the most viewed pages on a website. If your customers can resonate with your mission and your companies ideologies then there is a good chance they will have that warm fuzzy feeling about your company rather than someone else’s:

4) Self-Orientation:

This is the most important and most seldom used trust factor of them all. Self-orientation refers to how much the seller has to gain from the transaction. Important to not is the S (self-orientation) is at the bottom of the trust fraction so the bigger the self-orientation (i.e. the more the person doing the selling is perceived to gain from the sale taking place), the less customers inherently trust that sales person.

This is why, no customer has ever believed a salesperson who has exclaimed “my product is the best” even if they are authorities in the field and would rather trust complete strangers who have rated a product 5 out of 5 stars regardless of whether or not the stranger is an expert…Simply because the stranger has nothing to gain!

In order to leverage self-orientation on your website and keep the “S” as small as possible and thereby making your trust factor as large as possible, we recommend two ways to implement this on your website:

Who we are and who we are not a good fit for posts:

One of the most successful pages you can have on your website is a page which clearly defines who you are a good fit for and who you aren’t. The reality is most companies try to be everything to everyone which results in them being mostly nothing to everyone. When a company clearly defines who they are a good fit for and more importantly who they aren’t a good fit for, two remarkable things happen:

The good fit prospects automatically trust them more as they can clearly see that they fit in the “good fit” bucket and this company “gets them”. Also, they recognise that the company is brave enough to dissuade the wrong fit customers which endears them even further to the company.

The bad fit prospects are pushed away and don’t land up bogging down the salespeoples’ precious time.

Pros and cons of our products and services page:

Every company is quick to talk about all the good things about their product or service:

We are the best …

We are the quickest

We are the biggest

We have the best service

Etc,etc,

The problems about these is that because of the inverse relationship self-orientation has with trust no one believes this rhetoric. That’s why it’s far more effective to actually speak about the cons of your products as much or more often than the pros.

In our coffee business.We have received more positive comments about our pros and cons product listings than from any other page or post on our website. Here’s a screenshot of how we do it:

Closing Thoughts:

Using trust elements on one’s website is one of the best ways to improve traffic to lead conversion rates. This also often results in better, more engaged leads. We try to implement as many of these trust signals on our clients’ websites as quickly as possible regardless of industry or the business type as trust is a universally applicable sales tool which so few companies use in the offline as well as the online world. If you need some help converting more of your traffic on your website into leads please complete your details below: